Canadian composer Howard Shore first rose to prominence for scoring the films of David Cronenberg in particular. His memorable themes for The Brood, The Fly and Dead Ringers won him other projects for a range of other major film directors, including David Fincher (Seven), Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) and Martin Scorcese (After Hours). The project that earned him his greatest success, both in terms of awards and popular acclaim, was the score of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. What is interesting is that in many ways Howard Shore’s selection as the films’ composer was something of a surprise. After all, given his past collaboration with the likes of Cronenberg, Fincher and Demme, Shore was associated with dark, ominous films rather than popcorn blockbusters. Furthermore, he had never before taken on anything that compared with the sheer scale of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy (although in fairness hardly any composers in the history of film-making have either!). Of course, the Lord of the Rings films were no ordinary motion pictures and this is what attracted Howard Shore to the project in the first place. Shore’s score was hugely successful and won him his first Oscar, as well as a Grammy Award, and nominations for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. Ultimately, perhaps Shore’s greatest success, on a more prosaic level, is that it is now almost impossible to imagine any one of the Rings films without simultaneously humming one of Shore’s theme tunes.

Share this:

Like this:

Welcome Message

Welcome to my blog!

I'm a fantasy writer and on this site you'll not only find samples of my work but also articles concerning folklore, myth and legend, reviews of movies, books and graphic novels and much else besides (including the occasional short story - you lucky people!).

Go to the ‘Novels’ section of this website for more information and to read free samples of my longer fiction. Excerpts from my short fiction appear in the 'Short Stories' section of this website.

The 'Blogroll' below contains links to lots of other fantasy and sci-fi websites and the 'Writer Links' section of this site will take you to the websites of other authors whose work I admire.

If you like what you see on here don't forget that you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter too by clicking on one of the links below!

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

The Witch of Wicken Fen

Tolkien

It is something of a relief, having looked last month at his critics, to turn this time to Tolkien’s many admirers. It would not be true to say that there was no such thing as epic fantasy before Tolkien: there was a tradition of English and Irish writers before him, such as E R Eddison and […]

“This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.” With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgment of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of […]

1920s Oxford: home to C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and, in Paul Kearney’s novel The Wolf in the Attic, Anna Francis, a young Greek girl looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work all around them. Anna lives in a […]

In The Lord of the Rings a strange and primitive folk named the Woses came to aid the men of Gondor in breaking the siege of Minas Tirith. These wild woodland people lived in the ancient forest of Druadan, below the White Mountains. In form they were weather-worn, short-legged, thick-armed and stumpy-bodied and they knew wood-craft […]

Among the foulest beings that ever inhabited Middle Earth were the Great Spiders. They were dark and filled with envy, greed and the poison of malice. First of the beings that took spider form was Ungoliant, mother of the evil race that plagued the world thereafter, as well as a close ally of the first […]